But What Does It Mean?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Recently a friend found an AI generated fake trailer for a kind of 1950s-1960’s live Sailor Moon. This, it turned out wasn’t the only fake-retro live Sailor Moon trailer generated by AI. Somehow I feel the infamous failed Saban Sailor Moon has driven people to imagine such things differently (forgetting the rather well done live Sailor Moon from Japan).

Now I find these things amusing, but there was a strange emptiness about them. What, I wondered, was the point? I can imagine these things in my own head, and in fact have – once in the form of a late night discussion of Lucille Ball playing Sailor Moon (I was assuredly sober). Do I need someone to use tetchy AI to illustrate something?

As I contemplated the weird meaninglessness of these things, a friend who’s a talented cosplayer note that there was no point to such creations. What would have been truly amazing would not have been someone tossing prompts to an electricity-devouring toy, but to have rallied cosplayers and shot it live. Suddenly I got why so much of this AI art feels meaningless.

Let us imagine that some cosplayers had gathered to create a Sailor Moon trailer true to the spirit of the 50’s or 60s. They would have done research and studied costume design. They would have sewn, crafted, created, re-created, and perfected their work. Those doing the filming would have figured the angles of the time and how to get the color just right. Voiceovers would have been chosen to fit the period, perhaps finding veteran actors or new talent.

The creation of a few minutes of trailer would have involved people making, learning, researching, bonding. They would have made friendships that lasted a lifetime, spoken at cons, and taken their skills elsewhere. Someone may have used such a creation as a senior thesis, others in a portfolio. One small bit of fun would have impacted many people, echoing through their lives.

Or you can throw things into an AI. Sure there’s some talent in tweaking the prompts, calling the best shots, and so on. The editing of such things definitely requires skill. But so much of it is disconnected or not as connected as it should be. I won’t deny that a person with AI uses talent and inspiration to create a larger creation, but it lacks that big, meaningful picture of an effort without AI.

An artistic creation is a lot more than the time you watch it on screen.

What AI turns out is results with little human connection, history, inspiration, or meaning. It makes “product” in the most empty use of the term – something designed to appeal to someone’s interests, something to sell, a result not a thing with history and meaning. We’ve taken an interesting tool and now people pitch it as a substitute for being human.

This is another reason I’m skeptical on AI creations beyond some more personal and specific uses. Where’s the human connection? The team that learned from making a show? The author you love and get angry at in equal measure? The voice actors to fan over? The choices only a person could make – even if they’re the bad choices of an actual human? Where’s what comes next, with lessons learned and ideas built on?

It’s not there. Just a machine turning out stuff in the rough shape of what we asked. It doesn’t mean anything.

Steven Savage

The Throughlines

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Last week I discussed how I took a long walk where I reflected on my life and choices I realized that, as I drifted back over the years, my choices led to more and more “alien” selves the further back I got in time. At some point the you of the past is unknown territory and you can’t learn anything or relate to them.

Now I’d like to discuss an insight from the same exercise that is not about not who I am, but instead very much who I am.

To recap, at one point in my life I took a walk for over an hour, viewing points of “divergence” in my life, asking where choices may have led down different paths. Sometimes I realized that choices would take me so far away that I’d be a complete different person. However throughout this exercise I saw something else, I saw what I call the “Throughlines,” common, consistent parts of my life.

Throughout the many mes there were consistent patterns in my life, weaving not just the life I had now, but most of the possible ones I could see. There was me now, the mes’ I could have been, and behind that were certain, nearly omnipresent elements. I vaguely call them “Throughlines” because they are consistent over time.

I have always been a writer, and rarely go longer than a year or two without some writing project. I never became the fiction writer I once half-heartedly comprehended as a teen, but I am a writer. My past “maybe selves” included technical writing, grant writing, and science writing. Writing is a Throughline, a deeper me.

I’m always an organizer, always having a plan, always having a project. I ran RPG groups and zines, planned software, and more – it’s no wonder I became a Project Manager. Whatever choices I made in my life, I know I’d have been the guy with a scheme. Planning is a Throughline, a deeper me.

I bring people together, it’s the organizer in me. I’m the guy behind the movie night and the writing club, the gaming group. I love to network people so they can come together, and it’s visible in my past from where I was nearly an administrator for an anthropology department, all the way to team building now. Networking is a Throughline, a deeper me.

There’s other Throughlines of course, from my love of theology to the fact I always return to doing art (even when I’m not good at it). You get the idea, somewhere among all the mes I could have been, probably even the ones so strange I couldn’t imagine them, there were these Throughlines. There’s a me under all the me’s.

In fact, I could see times where I could have ignored my Throughlines, tried to be someone I’m not. I can also see how I would have been miserable. For instance, for those who know me, try to imagine me as a humorous corporate IT ladder-climber – had I gone that direction I’d have hit midlife crises two decades early.

As I noted last time, I invite you to try this exercise. Give yourself at least an hour to walk somewhere pleasant and work backwards through your life, asking who you’d have been with different choices. It’s not just a way to ask about different yous, you might just find out more of who you are, even if you’d have been someone different.

There’s a you behind the yous. Go on, get to know them.

Steven Savage

The Divergence of Self

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My friend Serdar was writing about the toxicity of nostalgia, choices, and the need to see what is in front of our nose. It’s easy to ask what could have been, to want to go back. It’s an urge I entirely understand, and one I think all humans has – as he notes, that’s just part of the planning section of our brain that’s taken us so far on Earth.

It will shock no one that the last few years I’ve wondered about what could have been – and still do. In fact, I probably do it too much, though perhaps that’s part of the human condition. Maybe that survival/planning part of our brain works best with a little unease, even moreso for a Project Manager like me. But I’d like to share an exercise I did once that puts some perspective on this desire to go back.

Once, years ago, while taking a walk, I thought about my desires to go back or start over, and turned it into an exercise – one that lengthened the walk to about an hour. I thought about the major choices in my life and asked “what if” about them and what would have happened. This was not an “if I knew then what I know now” exercise, such things are different and perhaps a little idealistic about our habits. This was “what if back then the me back them made a difference choice.”

Looking back a few years, I could easily see my decisions and likely outcomes. Many a decision in life is a knifes-edge change that could go one way or another, and the memories are fresh and merciless enough to evaluate with some level of accuracy. For instance, my current (and likely until-retirement) career in academia and medicine could have started years earlier but for some petty choices – a good reminder of my own flaws. The gap between “me” now and “me” a few years ago wasn’t so large I couldn’t relate.

As my mind traveled further back the results became colder, more distant, because the person then was not who I was now. What if I had started my consulting career earlier? What if I had not tried working at startups? What if I had moved to Seattle not California? As I rolled back the years in my head, the me of the past, even as he made different choices, became increasingly alien to the person I am now.

At some point in my replay, decades in my past when my IT career started, the me in the past diverged so much I didn’t know him. I could see the choices and possibilities in the past, but they led so far off the map in the present. At some point during this rewind I just stopped being anyone I could recognize or even guess.

Now this exercise was quite useful on many levels – perhaps I’ll write about it more in time. But also at some point you realize reliving the past and asking “what if” just doesn’t serve you. You’re different people than you were and are and could be, and at some point you have to return to what’s in front of your nose. If you’re mindful, such exercises on the past put you more in the present as you realize how you got here.

You can’t go back to who you were. Who you could have been is someone else, someone you wouldn’t recognize. But you can learn to a point about who you were to be better at who you are now.

I won’t lie – in these unsettled times the “if I could back and do it over knowing what I know now” is tempting. If such a magical opportunity arose, I’d like to think the current me is grounded enough in the present to make the right decision.

But for the people I was? I can’t speak for them. They’re not me. In some cases, they’re not anyone I even recognize.

Steven Savage